Amy Ray of Indigo Girls: We Were Afraid to Say We Were Gay

One half of the iconic folk duo reflects on the 21 years since Swamp Ophelia.

"And if we ever leave a legacy
It's that we loved each other well"—"Power of Two," Indigo Girls

When Amy Ray and Emily Saliers take the stage next Saturday at the inaugural Eaux Claires music festival—Justin Vernon of Bon Iver's antidote to overwrought, overcommercialized concerts—they will do something they haven't done in years: play their seminal Swamp Ophelia album in its entirety. But for Ray, whose speaking voice has the same metallic timbre that lends a sonic undertow to the folk duo's lilting melodies, the demand for beloved songs such as "Power of Two," "Least Complicated," and "Touch Me Fall" came as a surprise. "It's been pretty interesting to re-learn the record start to finish," she says with a laugh. "Some of the stuff I had to go back in and figure out how to play. I actually had to go online and see how people played it." And though it's been an exercise in nostalgia, revisiting old material is not without its downsides. "Some of my songs are not that great on it," she says. "The record's got some great stuff on it, but I was still figuring out some things about songwriting."

Devotees may protest, but in its B- review at the time, Entertainment Weekly called out the band's "college-poetry lyrics and wandering melodies" as the element that was "keeping them from becoming Indigo Women." If the themes feel girlish at times, perhaps it's owed to the fact that the Georgia natives began performing together in high school. "We started so young that there wasn't that pressure that you might feel when you start a band in your thirties and everybody is like, 'We've got to make it.' It was very, 'Let's just go have a good time,'" she recalls. "When you're in college, all your college friends come out and then after college, your life is like the music scene. You stay up 'til 4 a.m. It's a cultural thing, a cosmos, as much as anything else."

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Since releasing Ophelia at age 30, Ray has gone on to release nine additional albums with Saliers, five solo efforts, and become a mom to daughter Ozilline Graydon with partner Carrie Schrader. But personal growth aside, there remains a cultural constant that has plagued the duo since their first foray into the mainstream. "We would have talked about [our sexuality] in '93, but it would have been only in the context of someone that was interested in talking about it for a positive reason," she says. "I mean, gay women playing folk music is not, like, the most hippest thing in the world."

Social strides notwithstanding, Ray still insists that "there's still a lot that needs to happen" within the industry to which she has dedicated her life's work. "The gatekeepers for the majority of the media industry are still white men. And they have to die before we can, they have to die off..." she trails off. "Until the people that are coming up now are the ones that are holding the power," she begins again, "I think things are still going to be a little status quo. I know it's hard to believe that we would have been scared to even say we were gay [back then], but we were." And, according to Ray, it's a form of discrimination that has its own hierarchy. "The coverage you get when you're gay is so tied into sexism," she says. "If you're a gay person who is also a 'fashionista,' you're going to do better than a gay person who is masculine and butch."

And though she's looking forward to looking out at a sea of young faces—or as she calls them, "the people that really don't see those lines"—when she and Saliers take the stage to play some of their most iconic songs next weekend, she won't allow their legacy to dictate the performance's success. "I think the majority of the people there won't be big enough Indigo Girls fans to know that we're playing a record from start to finish," she says. "Our mission is to just play really well. I don't want the only people enjoying it to be people who are sentimental about the record. I want to actually play well, play the record better than we would have played it before." She pauses to catch her breath: "Hopefully we're better now at what we do."

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